American wildlife, one of the country's great natural resources, faces depletion and, in some cases, extinction. As Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall recently pointed out, “The seemingly irreversible trend in the world today …is toward more and more human beings, lumped together in ever-widening urban clusters.” Udall added that “Efforts to feed and clothe this surging population, together with the downright arithmetic of the space it must occupy simply to exist, impose a growing threat to wild areas and animals which remain.”

Hunters seeking food, fuel (whale oil), fur or plumage formerly inflicted the greatest damage on wildlife. Today, in contrast, man's destruction of wild creatures is largely inadvertent. Every new highway, airport or suburban development diminishes the amount of open land supporting birds and animals. Pollution of the nation's waterways has taken a heavy toll of fish and other marine life. And use of pesticides on cropland and trees has brought death to millions of birds and animals as well as to insects.

Endangered Species in America and Elsewhere

The wreck of the giant oil tanker Torrey Canyon off the Cornish coast of England in mid-March furnished a somber reminder that the needs of man and the needs of wildlife often are incompatible. Some 120,000 gallons of oil from the tanker spilled into the Atlantic; much of it washed ashore in Cornwall, fouling beaches and killing water birds. Winds later blew the massive oil slick toward Brittany, where a 3,000-acre oyster bed in the Jaundy River was destroyed. Janet Flanner reported in The New Yorker, April 29, that Brittany's waterfowl were virtually wiped out by oil contamination. The victims included cormorants, guillemots, and the only colony of puffins in France. Although a make-shift hospital was set up to wipe the birds clean, only one of every ten treated managed to survive.